PDFs are a file format created by Adobe that creates a file that is readable on many platforms without requiring special software to read while making them difficult to edit. These are good qualities for sending out a file that you want for someone to only read. For that reason, it is used in many professional capacities. While it is possible to make PDFs accessible, did you know many of them out there are not? This article seeks to give an overview on some of the major accessibility problems that are common in PDFs as well as resources that you can use to help present accessible documents to students.

Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat to make changes to pre-existing PDF documents. The University of Minnesota has a license for Adobe Acrobat Pro DC available for faculty and staff.

What Makes an Accessible PDF?

The Office for Digital Accessibility's page on Documents and PDFs has 4 qualifications for an accessible document. The document must be:

  • Searchable: Readers can use a digital device to search for words in the document.
  • Scannable: Readers can quickly scan a document to find out what it contains.
  • Legible: Sighted readers can physically read the text.
  • Readable: Readers can easily understand the messages in the document. 

OCR

Many PDFs out there are from scans of documents and books. While most people can read the images from these scans, the computer may not. This means that screen readers will not work on those PDF documents and also means that the text is not searchable. 

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. In short it is technology that helps computers recognize text and turn it into text that is recognizable to computers. Adobe Acrobat has a built in OCR software that can be used to convert a PDF’s scan of an image to have text that is usable to computers. That said the text would need to be legible in such a way that it is using a common font that looks clean. Chances are if you can’t read it, the computer can’t. Even in many cases the OCR may not recognize or confuse certain characters and mistakes in the conversion are possible depending on the quality of the text and print.

Check out Adobe’s Tutorial on Scan & OCR to make your PDFs text searchable.

Tagging 

The ability to scan a document quickly has a lot to do with the style of formatting your documents. The use of headers to chunk up information can allow readers to access the information they need quickly as well as seeing a quick overview of the topics and themes of a piece. Having properly headered PDFs makes your document scannable. The various parts of a document including the various levels of headings (i.e., Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.), paragraphs, tables and images all have tags associated with them to identify their purpose in the structure of a document to a screen reader.

Typically if a document has been created as a PDF from Microsoft Word it will take the tag and create the tags for the document. If the document went through OCR, Adobe will try to tag text components appropriately but it might require looking through and making sure the tagging and ordering on each page is appropriate.

Alt Text

As discussed in our article about Images and Accessibility, images in PDFs need alt text to be accessible for screen readers. Alt text in PDFs is vital for accessibility, especially with screen readers. It provides textual descriptions for images, ensuring that individuals with visual impairments can understand the content. Without alt text, important details and context in images may be lost, hindering accessibility. By including concise and informative alt text, content creators contribute to a more inclusive digital environment, allowing everyone to access and comprehend the information in PDF documents.

Title

The PDF title is not the same as it's filename. It is displayed when a PDF is opened. This is a requirement for making PDFs searchable since the title is communicated to readers with disabilities using assistive technologies. This is something that can be easily remedied: 

To find the title attribute and add it, you will want to open up the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and under Menu you will want to open Document properties. (Or press Ctrl+D)

PDF Document Properties can be found under the File menu


The Document properties window will appear and the first area you should see is the Description fields. While filling out the other fields like Author and Subject is encouraged, the only required field is the Title field. Once you have added the title, press OK at the bottom and save the PDF document again. You should be able to reupload the document to Canvas without triggering the Missing Title error.

Enter the PDF title in the "Title" field.

 

Do Not Use or Upload PDFs to Canvas

Generally, Word Documents that you have formatted appropriately and saved as a PDF will be searchable, scannable and legible in its PDF form. Once you have made the PDF, it’s always good to run an accessibility check through Adobe Acrobat.

For pre-existing PDFs, remediating them is a lot more involved and requires a significant amount to fix compared to web pages or other formats. There is also the meta-data that needs to be applied to the document for the title as well as the document’s language, read ordering of tagged items, etc. Sometimes you may encounter PDFs that are password protected meaning that unless you know the password, you will not be able to edit the PDF document to make it accessible. For all these reasons ATD and the Office for Digital Accessibility strongly advises staying away from using PDFs.

Preferable options include:

  • For a journal article or a section of a book, try to find it on the UMN Libraries website. Make a link to the UMN library resource using the permalink. This way the resource is either guaranteed to be accessible or the library is working with resource provider to make it accessible.
  • If the PDF comes from public website, link directly to that PDF rather than downloading it and uploading it to the website. If the PDF or information on an HTML page is from a government website, the resource is almost guaranteed to be accessible.
  • Keep the file in it's original format. The original Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Google Doc/Slides/Spreadsheet documents are much more preferable to PDFs since fixing accessibility issues is quicker and easier.
  • You can use UDOIT to import a PDF a document into a Canvas page. It is strongly recommend only importing content less than 2 pages into a Canvas page.

PDF Remediation

If you still really want to work at remediating your PDFs to be accessible, check out the resources below: